54 MUSICAL eVeNTS - -- Guell! T HE influence of the Keystone cops hung heavily over the Metropolitan's first presentation this season of "The Barber of Seville." , I will confess to a certain pleasure at witnessing the cops in seventeenth-cen- tury Seville, but it was a short-lived pleasure. There was so much aimless and absurd running about, so much to-ing and fro-ing, that throughout the evening the voices of the singers were forced to compete with their leg muscles. This is not a fair test for singers. It is a pity that Mr. Tajo, the Metropolitan's new basso, had to n1ake his local operatic de but under such ath- letic circumstances. He is obvi- ously a man of superior talent. As Don Basilio, he was vocally quite fine, if occasionally a little winded by the race. He has a pleasing, firm voice, somewhat lacking in power. To look at him, one would expect a voice that would bring the sets down, for he is a tremendously tall beetle of a man, with a huge head, a face that expresses ages 88 Main St., New Canaan, Conn. of exp rience, and hands that leap, flut- ter, point, and do everything but sing. Mr. Baccaloni, the Dr. Bartolo, was not consistentl} at his best. He appeared to be embarrassed by the presence of an- other funn} basso, and atten1pted to outcomic him. There were moments when I was afraid that Mr. Baccaloni would resort to parlor tricks. Toward CONTINENTAL ENTERTAINMENT the end of the evening, after he had be- NIghtly Except Sunday from 10 p. m. come reconciled to Mr. Tajo, his spirits rose and his voice showed a parallel im- provement. Miss Pons, the scheduled Rosina, was indisposed. Miss Gracias, who sounded somewhat indisposed, too, took her place. vIgor and comn1anding beauty. Not much can be said about Ronald Dun- can's libretto, either. It is as high-blown as a radio script with a college educa- tion, and no more profound. Mr. Dun- can has invested Lucretia's rape, in 509 B.C., by Tarquinius, with deep religious significance and some outrageous verba] nonsense, but the night I was there the principals played to the crowd, not to the cathe- dral. MISS Kitty Carlisle, as the violated one, was sadly miscast. Her voice is for the musical shows, and I hope she finds herself a nice one soon, with a good, hot score. A mimeographed handout sent to me before the opening hinted that in order to under- stand fully what was about to occur at the Ziegfeld, I should visit the Etruscan Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Agnes de Mille, the director, apparently visited the Wing and got trapped there. All through the first scene, in front of a tent outside Rome, the actors kept slapping at their faces and waving their arms, and I was puzzled until I realized that Miss de Mille's researches had uncovered the presence of mosquitoes in the Pontine Marshes some twenty-four hundred years before Mussolini. Only Miss Piazza, as Lucia; Mr. Tozzi, as Tar- quinius; and the elegant and striking sets of John Piper-true masterpieces of art in the theatre-achieved the hig 1 level toward which the entire produc- tion groaned and struggled. -PHILIP HAMBURGER Under Southern -". ,þ '! i!ë .1' t:' '. Skies t Pure silk shantung :!_,- . 1 evrd i :: ) e ;s ï) gests more than one. Sizes 10 to 18-$40 20 to 40-$45 118 EAST 60 ST. NEW YORK John Martin pr B nts GR TA K ll R and k r g) . PARK AVE. AT 59TH ST. Under New Management I am no longer connected with Research Foundation, Inc., 5 Beekman St., N .Y.C., American Workers Research Foundation. Inc., 5 Beekman St., N.Y .C., Gyro Motors, Inc., 5 Beekman St., N .Y.C., Eastern Gyro Motors Distributing Corp., Inc., 5 Beekman St., N.Y .C., Scientific Cosmetics, Inc., 5 Beekman St., N .Y..C. I. FRANKLIN ZOHN.-Adv. In the Times. What do you plan to do with all your spare time? I HAVE rarely encountered such pre- tentious humbuggery as "The Rape of Lucretia," the Benjamin Britten music drama, at the Ziegfeld Thea- tre. Perhaps the Ziegfeld, one of the largest theatres in town, is not the place for so intimate an opera. (Even in this wicked day and age, rape is something of a private matter.) Britten's work was first performed-in 1 946, at the Glyndebourne Festival-in a small op- era house. It is scored for only twelve instrumentalists, another fact that would seem to call for smaller quarters. Big house or little, the score does not appeal to me. I found it sketchy, elusive, and weak, with only isolated moments of "'*' tð new- \0\ s U )..tv.tt S (O 1 · ,, ,t\. ,,'lAlAtO ,aott.\\\Þ sutO t . at 01tO · C.lt "tO A al ALUGArOR ..DBAG GLAIED . OrE · LEA THER 'E'AI'ED .0 · tENEtvÉ D 'ELINED Mil GlO'lf.S ll eIEMA"tÐ \\.0:(1 , II (lt D . tliSMA.'tD Dclive:} Scrv,ice t\M1( in Manhattan t\;VtCJ1a\?'R ;; 1052 FIRST AVENUE OF AMERI{A tNC AT 57TH STREET . . NEW YORK 22. N. Y.. MaIIOrdelsDept.N. . Will you tell me how to kill a nut tree? R. HABERLIN. ANSWER-To kill a nut tree, cut it do,vn and dig out the stump and roots. -Boston Sunday Post Better jump on it two or three times, too.